“Curtain Call”: A Crime Tale and Character Piece

“Curtain Call” is One Last Heist.

We’ve heard it all before, but never this way.

Rob the Credits

What’s It All About?

Vincent is a bit of a lost soul.  He’s thirty, living in Southwestern France, and trying to reconcile with the mother of his child, who lives in Africa.

His family life is messed up, so he lives out on his own, near broke and working a series of dead-end jobs to make ends meet.  All he wants is to get back to Africa — Senegal, specifically — to be with the child he’s never seen and the woman he loves, but left.

Yes, he’s a self-described [expletive deleted]hole.

He’s friends with Gaby Rocket who, through Vincent’s first person narration throughout the book, we learn is both his friend and his partner-in-crime.  Gaby loves the American Rockabilly lifestyle (shades of “Motor City“), and lives life with a pompadour, leather jacket, jeans, and black boots.

He’s also self-destructive, picks fights with the wrong people and often gets beaten up for it.  He’s gruff and racist and foul-mouthed and quick-to-trigger and highly opinionated. Cigarettes and drinks soothe him.

Together, the two plot out a armed truck robbery, with plans to split the money after giving some away to the less well off.  It’s the one break Vincent needs to fix his life, get back to the woman of his dreams, and to start a new life. It’s a planned victimless crime meant to solve all his problems.

As you might expect from even this short synopsss, this is a Mature Readers book, for language, sex, violence, and just being about the brutal life of messed up adults that nobody should ever have to live through.

How Do We Get There?

Wilfrid Lupano’s narrative works hard at not telling you the whole story right away.  Vincent begins to regale you with the set-up until he gets distracted by something else, returning to it later only when needed. It’s open loop after open loop.

This approach is never frustrating, though.  Yes, you want the answers, but the timing of them turns out to be far more satisfying when they’re spooned out this way.

It’s a very dense story, with a lot of background details that surface to flesh out the characters’ lives in often devastating, ways.  Everyone gets an origin story, often with a major surprise or two along the way.  These are not happy or lucky people.  They’re people grinding out a place in the world, by hook or (more often) by crook.  They’re surrounded by shady people, and they model that behavior.

Lupano, I discovered in his bio in this book, is a classically trained writer. That is, he went to school at La Sorbonne for degrees in literature and philosophy.  It shows up most blatantly on one page where the lead character suddenly draws parallels to a situation in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” I get that he’s trying to show the differences between the luckless loser who’s not a big thinker and his new younger partner who’s a planner and (only slightly) more erudite, but it just comes off a little over the top.

He also slips in political statements in his work here, as he does with “The Old Geezers.”  In this case, Vincent is acting like Robin Hood, and specifically robbing from the rich to give (a portion of it) to the poor. He justifies his whole crime as being victimless because the planned heist will lead to a chain of command in which nobody will take responsibility and the buck will just get passed around for years before everyone gives up. They’re not robbing the guy down the street.  They’re robbing a faceless bureaucracy of red tape and lawyers.  Screw them!

It’s wonderfully cynical and just a tad true, which is why is resonates so much. Who hasn’t been frustrated by a business process that sends you in circles while everyone tries to not do their job?

The Art of Rodguen

This isn’t the typical big nose art fare that I love so much, but it still has a lot of that energy in it.  Rodguen’s characters are always acting with the story.  They’re never stony faced and left for the author to explain.  Rodguen does a lot of acting on these pages.

It should come as no surprise, then, that he’s an animator.  This is a book he worked on during the weekend for four years to complete. His day job is at Dreamworks Animation, where he worked on things like (one of my favorites of the time) “The Road to El Dorado”, “Madagascar,” “Kung Fu Panda,” and more.

This helps to explain why it is that his characters are always in motion on the page.  He’s trained to show the story in cinematic ways.  He doesn’t need to go to wide screen panels to emulate storyboards here, though.

He’s comfortable with the comic book single page format and adjusts his art for it.  He even plays with the formalities of storytelling at times, emulating a puzzle when the story calls for it.

Rodgeun’s style is also left wide open, to let the coloring fill in the gaps.  It’s all the same thin black ink line in the book, depicting broken people who are half crumbling over at any given time, their shirts and pants bunched up at all the joints, and hanging off their backs.

Rodguen makes the world feel real, with lots of details in the backgrounds to sell the location, whether it’s a desolate stretch of road, or a cheap, dirty one bedroom apartment with decor dating back thirty years.

Ohazar’s colors keep things interesting without getting overly busy. He’s not color-keying things, except for some flashbacks.  The colors he chooses can get a little sickly at times, with pale yellows and greens filling out some backgrounds. It fits the style of the book as a seedy crime drama.

The two work together remarkably well. Rodguen’s style is set up for this style of coloring, and Ohazar steps in to finish the book off in the way it was meant to be.

Recommended?

Yes, this is an entertaining, well thought out crime piece that’s more character study than the heist it proclaims itself to be.  It’s not always pretty, but it does make you root for the protagonist, who’s a bit of a jerk. Pairing him up with an exponentially larger jerk certainly helps…

Rodguen’s art sells it, every step of the way.  He’s a first time comics artist, but you’d never guess it from this impressive piece of work.

I read this book digitally, but I’d be tempted to pick up the hardcover, if I ever ran across it in a store.  (See below.)

— 2018.098 —

Buy It Now

For those of you who prefer print comics, I have good news for you.  This one is published in North America by Lion Forge.  It’s a hardcover book and everything.  Here’s my Amazon Affiliates link if you’re so inclined:

(It costs you nothing extra to buy it through that link, but it helps keep the servers on around here…)

If you prefer digital, then here are your usual links:

Hint: Do some comparison shopping. Prices do vary.